The social process of projects

On a day, two years to the day before the London 2012 Olympics are due to open, and a day on which the alleged spiraling budget for that project (from around an original 2 bn pounds to around 9bn now) is again in the news, – do you feel that early estimates for project times and costs seem to suffer from habitual, ingrained optimism?

I do – though my experience is in the more normal range of projects costing hundreds of thousands of pounds to low digit millions of pounds. There’s obviously a lot to be said about this phenomenon – but I only want to touch on one aspect: The underestimation of the social process of projects.

You see, in my experience, and in this materialistic world in which people pay more attention to tangible things rather than the things that really represent value, projects are planned and costed mainly in respect of the input needs to produce the hard, logical deliverables.Whether that is executing a business study or developing some new IT system, the focus is generally on the time, effort and materials needed to produce the thing that is seen as the end product.

Far less effort is given to business change and in particular to the social processes involved in the project.

What do I mean by “social processes” here? I mean the cycles of consultation, review, input, nuancing and politic-ing needed to gain approval, agreement and buy in to, well, almost any aspect of the project: it’s deliverables, what is said about them, their significance and relationship to other developments and so on. And these social processes are pretty hard to contain. Around 18 months ago I started a two-week task for a client that wasn’t finally signed off and agreed until around five months later – all because of emergent and unforeseeable social processes necessary to the organisation.

So tomorrow I have to debate this issue again on another project – on behalf of a colleague whose project it is and who has asked for my support. It’s the usual case of the business change effort in a system deployment being cut back because, logically speaking, the work involved (developing and delivering training, support, process change and communications) can be done in a shorter time and with less effort than our (already self-censorially cut-back) workplan shows.

I can’t help but feel that we underestimate the invisible, but frankly unavoidable social processes that are an integral aspect of real project management.